Sheetar

knitting

Socktoberfest 2009

By Sheetar 6 September 2009 6 September 2009

I’m sure this post will be of no interest to non-knitters, but here it is.

Oh yes, the annual tradition of Socktoberfest is coming up on us quickly. October is only about three weeks away, and this means four glorious weeks of sock knitting during October. This also means I have to make a battle plan and be ready to complete four pairs of socks during the month. Yes, I’m pushing myself a little, but I’m pretty sure I can do it this year, especially after coming so close last year.

So, I’m going to open this to suggestions from the public. Pick a yarn and a pattern from my stash and sock queue on Ravelry and tell me what to knit. I never seem to be able to decide for myself, so give me some ideas!

2009 Knitting, Finished Objects, Socks, Spinning

August Knitting Wrap-up

By Sheetar 2 September 2009 7 February 2012

I’m actually on time! Back again to the Knitting Resolutions..

3. Knit one pair of socks per month

>Handspun Wanida
Pattern: Wanida
Designer: Cookie A.
Needles: US 1 (2.25mm)
Yarn: My own Handspun
–Ravelry Project Link–

I’m fiercely proud of these. The handspun is a superwash BFL by Twisted Fiber Art that I spun as part of Tour de Fleece. It knitted up and wears absolutely beautifully. Even though there’s a jog in the color change for the heel, I still like how they came out and worked with the pattern. Knitted up quick and those colors are just spectacular!

4. Spin four ounces of roving per month.
We gots your spunroving right here. This is 632 yards of fingering weight yarn that was started during Tour de Fleece and finished up in August. When I realized I had 632 yards, I figured it was way more than 4 ounces to begin with, so I’m saying it’ll count for August. It’s navajo plied and is a merino roving that was found at Maryland Sheep & Wool festival this year. We had a dye day not too long ago and I dyed this at the event. Love the way it came out and now I have to find something that will use the whole batch of yarn.

Still making progress on that sweater, but as the year is already half-over, I’m not sure if I’ll actually complete all my resolutions and goals. Well, there’s always next year, right?

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 13

By Sheetar 30 August 2009 30 August 2009

One Local Summer’s last meal is on the table and consumed already. I can’t believe we made it to the end of the challenge and participated in every single week! This week, we threw a whole chicken in the smoker with some barbeque sauce leftover from the pulled pork sandwiches and let her cook up while some zucchini, garlic, basil, onions, and peppers were simmered together with last year’s tomato sauce from the garden. I decided to pop open a jar of the zucchini pickles, and WOW are they delicious. Definitely worth doing again next year. Non-Local ingredients include some vinegar, mustard seed, turmeric (pickles), olive oil, and McCormick’s Chicken Rub. Here’s the rundown of local ingredients.

Zucchini: My Garden
Basil: Back Deck Garden
Peppers: My Garden
Garlic: Willow Creek
Onions: North Star Orchard
Chicken: Mt. View Organics
Barbeque sauce: Leftover from Week 11
Wine: New Hope Winery’s Raspberry Wine

Final thoughts – I’m SO glad I participated in this year’s challenge and I can’t wait to do it again. This challenge has gotten me into local foods and has actually gotten me cooking (something that shocked and amazed my family and friends). I hope to continue doing one local meal a week since our Phoenixville Farmer’s Market is open year-round and I can get most items (except for seasonal vegetables) regularly. Thanks to the folks at FarmToPhilly.com for hosting the challenge!

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 12

By Sheetar 23 August 2009 23 August 2009

We had a sort of hectic week, but I still managed to get a local meal in. There was a party at the house last night, and I managed to get up in the morning and throw together some pancakes (quickly becoming a favorite around here) with some fresh plums from the farmer’s market. Ingredients are the same as Week 9, but with no blackberries this time. The plums were sliced and plopped on the griddle to warm up, then put in a bowl with some maple syrup and cinnamon while the pancakes were being made. The tartness of the slightly under-ripe plums worked really well with the sweetness of the maple syrup and the whole thing was just plain delightful, receiving rave reviews from the guests who stayed over for the night. Non-local ingredients include cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar.
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma
Egg – Mt. View Organics
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Plums – North Star Orchard
Maple Syrup – Miller’s Maple

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 11

By Sheetar 16 August 2009 16 August 2009

And another week down, bringing us to week eleven of the One Local Summer challenge. This week we decided to attack the pulled pork sandwich. I wasn’t able to find locally baked rolls that would work for sandwiches, so we found Vermont Bread Company rolls at Kimberton Whole Foods that worked out well, even if they’re not really that local. It’s probably the biggest non-local item I’ve used, but I really, honestly tried to find local rolls that would work and just couldn’t find any. Oh well! We did go the extra mile with the barbeque sauce and made that from scratch. The dinner was delicious and while the pork butt took all day to cook in the smoker and then crock pot, it was WELL worth it. Non-local ingredients used (other than the rolls) were in the barbeque sauce: pepper, salt, cider vinegar. The rest of the ingredient run down follows.

Corn: Kimberton Whole Foods (locally grown)
Peaches: North Star Orchards
Feta Cheese: Apple Tree Goat Dairy
Pork Butt: Countrytime Farm
Maple Sugar: Miller’s Maple
Tomatoes: Jack’s Farm
Garlic: Jack’s Farm
Onion: North Star Orchards

2009 Knitting, Socks, Spinning

June and July Knitting Wrap-up

By Sheetar 13 August 2009 7 February 2012

I guess this is becoming a bi-monthly thing instead of a monthly update. We’ll re-visit the Knitting Resolutions.

3. Knit one pair of socks per month
Did it again. Seven pairs so far (well Eight if you count the ones I’ve already finished for August), and I can’t wait to get to December and post all twelve of them in one big post.


Rare Monkey Gems	Jupiter Lava Socks
Pattern: Monkey	Pattern: Hey Jupiter
Designer: Cookie A.	Designer: Liz Abinante
Needles: US 1 1/2 (2.5mm)	Needles: US 1 (2.25mm)
Yarn: Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks That Rock Lightweight – Rare Gems	Yarn: dkKnits Technicolor Smoosh Toes
-Ravelry Project Link-	-Ravelry Project Link-
These knitted up in FOUR DAYS. Four days. I had the pattern memorized after one repeat and it was so simple yet beautiful, I’m positive these won’t be my last monkey socks. The rare gems came from Rhinebeck last year and I just LOVE how the colors pooled up.	This was the sock of the month from Yarn4Socks. After a false start (too tight to fit over my heel), I added four stitches in and they worked out perfectly. I did an extra repeat on the leg since there was plenty of yarn. The color is FANTASTIC and the pattern was super fun to knit.

4. Spin four ounces of roving per month.
Well I got eight ounces in one month? Does that count? I decided to go ahead and put away the knitting for a month and spin along with Tour de Fleece, a yearly spinning event that takes place during the Tour de France. Well I spun my little feet off and ended up with two finished skeins and one half-spun chunk of roving.

	This merino/tussah roving was from dkKnits and is spun up to laceweight, 789 yards. I think maybe this is why I only completed two skeins during Tour de Fleece! It spun up delightfully soft and squishy and I just love how the colors came out.
	This is a roving from Twisted Fiber Art and is the Brilliant Roving (superwash BFL) in the colorway, Blaze. It spun up to fingering weight and came out to 420 yards. I’ve already knitted up a pair of socks with this and they are AWESOME if I do say so myself. An absolute delight to spin and knit, definitely a roving I’ll be working with again.

And I think that’s about it. I haven’t really made any more progress on the other goals, and should probably get started on that considering the year is well over half done.

food

Cupcakes and Pickles

By Sheetar 11 August 2009 7 February 2012

I honestly never meant for this to be a food blog. But I seemed to have (re)discovered the fun of cooking and baking over the summer, in part because of the One Local Summer challenge. I was the microwave queen – I regularly told people that I didn’t cook, I microwaved, and I got married so that I would have someone to cook for me (the husband, he really likes our kitchen). Well I guess I can’t say that anymore, now can I? There are two food related things I’d like to share with you today. Maybe a knitting post later this week

This is a sweet little creation, the Double Vanilla Cupcake. Delightful! There’s something so fresh and sweet about a good vanilla bean ice cream that I really enjoy and that translated 100% into this recipe. I whipped these up last night for a friend’s birthday and they were a big hit. We stuck them in the fridge to firm up the icing (it was REALLY hot today) and they came out just perfect, so much so that a chocoholic even rated them a 99 out of 100 (with chocolate being the unbeatable 100). Not bad, if I do say so myself. The real vanilla beans are what make these so delicious and I can’t imagine making them without the beans. Oh and we had a little extra icing, so I need to find some graham crackers to make some icing sandwiches since that’s what mom did when we were kids and had some leftover icing from a birthday cake. OM NOM NOM.

Lemon Cucumber Pickles! That is, Lemon Cucumber, not lemon flavored cucumbers. I promised a post about these, and here it is. I decided to go all out and got myself a pressure canner and the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, commonly referred to as the ‘bible’ of canning and preserving. These pickles are the basic dill pickle recipe with the added garlic and were rather simple to make. Slice home-grown cucumbers, let soak overnight with salt and ice, boil pickling spice and vinegar, process filled jars in boiling water! It’s really that easy. The hardest part is waiting about four weeks for them to mature and marinate in the jars. They’re sitting on my kitchen counter, taunting me with their cheerful yellow rinds and mustard seeds, telling me how delicious they will be if I could just wait another two or three weeks. I’m not sure I have that much will power.

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 10

By Sheetar 9 August 2009 9 August 2009

Week ten of one local summer is cooked and consumed already. The husband is home again and decided to try something different – tacos! I was in charge of the taco shells and toppings while he did the filling. I found a good shell recipe here which used both cornmeal and flour. I went with whole wheat flour instead of regular old all-purpose flour and it didn’t seem to make a difference. They were surprisingly easy to make and then form inside of a napkin holder lined with some tin foil. It looked a little funny, but it worked out well! The husband improvised a taco spice recipe (sadly, none of those are local, but it tasted great!) which he added to some ground bison and onions. I also found these curious little mexican gherkin cucumbers at the farmer’s market on saturday and just had to bring them home after Jack let me taste one. They’re sweet, with a little sour and just perfectly bite sized. It’s really amazing me, week by week, the different things we can make using local ingredients that I never even thought of doing (making taco shells from scratch?!). This is totally spoiling my ideas of store-bought and semi-homemade that I had been used to cooking (and mostly microwaving), but all in a good way. I’ve recently been doing some canning and preserving and I should do a post on that too – it’s another new thing this year that I’m trying and is again, surprisingly easy – much easier than I had thought!

There were a few non-local ingredients in this week’s meal which included salt, canola oil, and the taco spices. Here are the local ingredients:
Ground Bison – Backyard Bison
Onions – North Star Orchard
Tomatoes – Our Backyard Garden
Peppers – Cressley’s Greenhouse
Mexican Gherkins – Jack’s Farm
Fat Cat Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm
Lettuce – Willow Creek
Corn Meal – Mill at Anselma
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma